[Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development

[Octavian Râsnita]

From: "Robert L Cochran" <cochranb at speakeasy.net>
> In my company, the selection of programming languages is determined by
> what is specified in our Enterprise Architecture. That specification
> does not include perl or perl-ish frameworks. It does include .NET and
> Sun Java. For frameworks at Tier B, we use Rational Application
> Developer and various Rational tools. Yes, they cost a lot of money, but
> there are a lot of people trained in their use and there are a heck of a
> lot of free tutorial resources available. That means an applications
> programmer faced with a deadline can get support fast.

Many companies do the same because if there are more programmers, it means 
that they won't depend on a few persons.

>I'm not sure how
> perl fits in the ELC, because so many different reviews from different
> IT areas are required in the ELC and I'm not sure how perl would pass
> scrutiny in these areas.

It is hard for perl to pass anything, because perl is just a term, but 
nothing more.
10 different programs made using 10 different combinations of perl 
frameworks and templates, form managers, ORMS, and other modules can create 
10 different languages, and I think there are very few perl programmers in 
the world that know them all, to be able to tell that they know "perl" in 
general.

> Without the training, without the documentation, without the tools
> needed to educate positive masses of programmers, Catalyst will not go
> very far. It is very hard to use right now, unless you have training.

This is true. There is a lot of documentation in the POD docs, but the 
beginners and not only them, don't even know in which POD documentations to 
look for... say the list of all the methods of $c object when using certain 
Catalyst modules.

Of course, this is just a part of the problem, because at least in my 
countries I've seen only 2 books translated that talk about perl, one of 
them "Bash and Perl" that has a single chapter about Perl, and another book 
that teaches only about Perl, book that appeared originally in 2001, beeing 
very old, and not a very good quality in my opinion anyway.
(The books are copied, scanned and read for free anyway, so there are no 
many book writers that want to write books here.)
In these conditions, I don't know how many would buy a book about 
Catalyst...

> part: "..it is hard to beat the top quality documentation that is
> produced by Microsoft." That is why Microsoft Office is the most widely
> adopted officeware platform now. Microsoft provided great documentation
> from the start, made Word and other tools very easy to use, and people
> bought. I think Microsoft's dominance in the market is testimony to the
> effectiveness of their superb documentation.

Well, I never liked any of the Microsoft Press documentation or their 
documentation for the exams of certified professionals.
I always thought that there should be somewhere another documentation that 
really tells at least to the certified professionals what's happening behind 
the GUI, but I couldn't find such a thing.

Octavian